D’Souza’s Bizarre Attack on Obama
The staggeringly dishonest Dinesh D’Souza has a new movie coming out, based on his idiotic book criticizing — yes, criticizing — Obama for being anti-colonialist (what sane, decent person isn’t?). Here’s the trailer, which says nothing at all. It darkly implies that Obama wants to “downsize America” (whatever that could possibly mean) and contrasts that with the founding fathers, who supposedly wanted “growth.” Just bizarre.
D’Souza’s deranged claims about Obama and anti-colonialism aren’t even taken seriously by the more sane conservatives, like Andrew Ferguson, editor of The Weekly Standard, who savaged the book and D’Souza for his dishonesty and his delusions:
The insight with which D’Souza has stunned him is purely abstract and syllogistic: (1) Barack Obama really admired his father, Barack Obama Sr., and wanted to be like him; (2) Obama Sr. grew up in Kenya and became an anticolonial agitator; therefore (3) Obama Jr. wants to be an anticolonial agitator, too, and since he’s simultaneously president of the United States, he gets to be anticolonial in a very big way and drag us along with him.
“The central tenets of [Obama Sr.’s] anticolonial ideology,” D’Souza writes, “are alive and well three decades later in the White House. . . . We are today living out the script for America and the world that was dreamt up not by Obama but by Obama’s father.”
From that set of radical ideas flows every policy of Obama’s that has annoyed Republicans and confounded the public: the bank bailouts, the takeover of the auto industry, the huge fiscal stimulus, the health care bill, the hostility to the rich, the feckless approach to foreign affairs, even NASA’s budget cuts. D’Souza applies his insight with a clever simulation of the scientific method, insisting on his own clinical detachment at every step. Sometimes he sounds like a lab technician holding up a petri dish to a classroom of third-graders. “The best way to verify a theory is to test its explanatory power,” he writes, pedantically. “If the theory can account for Obama’s major policies and . . . also explain the little details about Obama, details that otherwise seem puzzling or mysterious, that would give our paradigm a degree of confirmation that very few comprehensive theories enjoy in politics.”
Readers will not be shocked that D’Souza’s paradigm easily passes D’Souza’s test, thanks to the author’s misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation. The misstatements range from the very small to the very large. As “further evidence that this anticolonial reading is on the right track,” he cites Obama’s press conference after the Gulf oil spill.
“Time and again,” he writes, Obama “condemned ‘British Petroleum’—an interesting term since the company long ago changed its name to BP. Given our anticolonial theory, it’s no surprise that Obama wanted to remind Americans of what BP used to stand for.”
Right you are, Holmes! Except . . . I’ve read the transcript of the press conference, and Obama didn’t make a single reference to British Petroleum—a name which, in any event, is commonly used by many people of a certain age (including me) who are sworn enemies of anticolonialism. D’Souza makes many errors of this sort, citing facts that aren’t facts in support of an otherwise unsupported conclusion. He says that Obama, in his memoir Dreams from My Father, never mentions his father’s drunkenness. Obama mentions it often. Indeed, D’Souza misreads the entire memoir: Far from admiring his father and emulating him, Obama makes his disillusionment with his father one of the themes of his own life story.
And where facts are missing altogether, faulty reasoning bolsters the case. “Wonder why Obama went to Harvard?” D’Souza slyly asks. “Here is a clue: It is the leading academic institution in America. And here’s another: His father went there.” Forget that neither of these facts is a clue, technically. Surely the first assertion is enough to adequately answer the question without recourse to the second, which is simply gratuitous as well as conjectural. But D’Souza always sees absence of evidence as evidence of something or other.
D’Souza is the very definition of the intelligent partisan; he’s smart enough to manipulate facts, but only in the service of ideology.
harold:
May 20th, 2012 at 9:06 am
So “sane conservative” Andrew Ferguson is also anti-anticolonialism, he just doesn’t agree with D’Souza that Obama is very anticolonial.
What does it mean to be a “sworn enemy of anti-colonialism”? Doe it mean that he literally believes that large parts of the world should still be colonies, ruled by outside powers?
How does he square that with life in the US, which was created via a very anti-colonial revolution?
jamessweet:
May 20th, 2012 at 9:45 am
D’Souza is the anti-Popper. “If a theory isn’t falsifiable, then it must be true!”
(FWIW, the best way to verify a theory is to test its predictive power.)
Ellie:
May 20th, 2012 at 9:52 am
I’m sure D’Souza is in the van, leading the way to overthrow the rebel government in favor of a return to the Crown and Mother England.
laurentweppe:
May 20th, 2012 at 11:00 am
That’s not funny: D’Souza hail from a family of portugese aristocrats complicit in this
Trebuchet:
May 20th, 2012 at 11:22 am
D’Souza’s parents were from Goa, which at the time he was born was still a Portugese colony but was annexed by India a few months later. I wonder if that makes “Anti-Colonialism” a bit of a hot button for him?
garnetstar:
May 20th, 2012 at 11:57 am
Black people fighting over a game of Monopoly is leading to the downsizing of America.
reverendrodney:
May 20th, 2012 at 1:00 pm
Why this idiot continues to push “anti-colonialism” is beyond me.
He must believe that we yearn for the good old days… 1775. And why Newt Gingrich associated with him is a mystery, except that D’Souza spewed some important sounding anti-Obama phrases, and that was good enough for Newt, who even parroted D’Souza’s favorite word: “Anti-colonialist”.
Trebuchet @ 5:
D’Souza has expressed dismay over the loss of privilege when Goa lost it’s colony status. Wish I could cite where exactly he said that, but I’m pretty sure I read it through FTB.
Phillip IV:
May 20th, 2012 at 1:02 pm
And at the same time, he’s so completely incapable of thinking outside of his ideological framework that he just shoots himself in the foot. “Sane” conservatives do not oppose him because his arguments would be any more contrived and disingenuous than their own, they only oppose him because they, unlike him, realize that the label of “anti-colonialist” isn’t the magic bullet D’Souza for personal reasons believes it to be, and that his ramblings distract from the (equally fake) narrative they are trying to establish on Obama.
BrianX:
May 20th, 2012 at 1:19 pm
I am firmly convinced that “anti-colonialist” is just a pseudointellectual dog whistle for “whitey hater”. That’s all it is. When Newt started parroting the term, it indicated to me once and for all that the dog whistles were going away and the right wing was going long on outright naked racism.
mechtheist:
May 20th, 2012 at 1:29 pm
D’Souza certainly doesn’t surprise in these flagrant nose-thumbings at facts. How much of this mental-diarrhea does he believe? Is most of his intelligence going only to deceiving himself? At this magnitude, it is serious delusion, it’s mental disorder. The insanity evidenced by so many of late grows more profound every day, hopefully they will snap out of it soon, there isn’t much room left before reaching the ‘scarfing down ones own feces’ stage.
sivivolk:
May 20th, 2012 at 1:37 pm
@1 Harold,
Er, you do know the USA is a colonialist nation, right? Like, there were people who lived there prior to “settlement”?
The colonization of North America and Australia is different from, say, Africa, or South Asia, because the colonial powers here displaced the original inhabitants and created nations of their own citizens in those places, rather than establishing dictatorships and ruling the existing citizens as in other places, but it’s still colonization.
tacitus:
May 20th, 2012 at 1:56 pm
I would tend to agree that’s why this thesis resonates with so many conservatives — not necessarily as overt racism, (D’Souza is an ethnic Indian, after all) but more as a refection of their belief that the Western “Judeo-Christian” colonial practices have been a net positive in black/brown areas of the world that used to be under colonial control (like India).
And so, just as they play down the more shameful parts of American history, conservatives are trying to do the same thing with colonial history, ignoring just how brutal and undemocratic colonial rule used to be.
KG:
May 20th, 2012 at 2:04 pm
Indeed so. The differences are pretty much entirely accounted for by factors of human ecology: the pre-conquest population density, the resistance of existing populations to European diseases, the resistance of European colonists to local diseases, and the suitability of the colonised country for European agriculture.
Skip White:
May 21st, 2012 at 12:32 pm
I believe by “downsizing America,” D’Souza means that Obama plans to fire all the red states.
Winterwind:
May 22nd, 2012 at 2:34 am
Perhaps not quite overt, but it’s extremely transparent. The fact that D’souza is a conservative of self-hating Indian/Christian background (who thinks European Christianity was the best thing to invade India) might allow conservatives to pretend they’re not racist, but no one’s fooled. Uncle Toms have been around forever.